Of course we were puzzled by CloudFlare's pricing structure. However, all of their advertising material kept reiterating that they were making money off low-tier customers by collecting lots of data required to properly serve their business and enterprise customers. So our sense of alarm and disbelief was somewhat suspended until CF contacted us about our bandwidth consumption, but even then we didn't realize how much trouble we were facing, as they first told us that a $1k subscription would do the trick.
Watching competing projects also added some degree of assurance. Without giving out any specific names, we are aware of a number of competing projects that even now keep heavily relying on CloudFlare (although I am obviously unaware of how much they pay), so we didn't consider it an abusive behavior. In contrast, we were also aware of at least one competitor that kept pushing a considerable portion of their uploads to imgur and basically parasitizing on them for a long time until imgur's abuse team finally took notice and brought down the hammer.
However, all of their advertising material kept reiterating that they were making money off low-tier customers by collecting lots of data required to properly serve their business and enterprise customers.
This makes it sound like we are doing some monetization of low-tier customer data. We are not doing that with any data (low-tier or anything else). That would be hella creepy.
We do track abuse (DDoS attacks, etc.) whoever they hit and use that information to protect other customers. So, in that sense low-tier customers help our overall business, but it's a common lie from our competitors that we are somehow monetizing traffic. Cloudflare's business is pretty simple: work out how to operate our services as cheaply as possible, charge web site/application owners more than that amount.
Apologies, that was a poor choice of wording on my part. While I do entertain the theoretical possibility that CF silently uses low-tier customer data in interesting ways (such as data mining and tracking user behavior), my actual expectations of the way CF actually uses this data exactly matches your description (DDoS mitigation & things like that).
Sure as hell we don't. Setting up AdSense and content recommendations widgets did the trick for a long time and allowed the project to grow; the team has not been active enough in exploring better monetization channels.
Also, before PostImage came to use CF, it used a number of cool tricks to conserve bandwidth that had since then been cut out as they were incompatible with CDN caching. Source: I'm with the team.
The project is now certainly larger than it was expected to become, although this doesn't absolve the team of not taking preemptive action sooner. Disclaimer: I'm with the team.
Because early in the negotiation phase CF sales rep said that a $1k/mo plan would be a good enough upgrade, and this was an unpleasant but a sustainable figure.
One server would not be nearly enough. PI is running on 14 dedicated machines, and even this is not enough to handle the load without a caching CDN. Source: I'm with the team.
If you have the engineering capacity, and your business model can at least sustain some amount of overhead, you can build your own CDN.
Look into PhoenixNAP and other similar providers that are located at non-profit peering sites and have reduced bandwidth costs.
PhoenixNAP (as the example) will lease you a mid range bare metal server with 16GB/RAM and 100TB of data/mo in the $150.00/mo - $300.00/mo range (depending on your processor needs; well optimized nginx doing just proxying should scream).
You can't exceed some unwritten bandwidth cap because you're explicitly paying extra for the 100TB of BW. For 20 caching servers firing 2PB/mo you're looking at around $3000 - $6000/mo...
Seems like you could optimize this down with fewer high powered caching servers and paying for the extra bandwidth... is the engineering time and $2500/mo really out of reach?
RoboCV (http://robocv.com/), a pretty good Russian company is missing from the list. These are the same guys who were participants of Google Lunar X Prize but aborted midway due to lack of funding.
NK can be considered a natural disaster or something else that you cannot bargain with (unless you're with the Chinese government). Holding NK at fault here is about as practical as holding at fault gravity if the guy tried to vandalize an ad billboard, fell down, broke his spine and spent the next 15 years paralyzed. So if this guy really did what the news claims he did, he has a rather big problem with his mental abilities. Saying "he doesn't actually deserve 15 years in prison" is akin to saying "he doesn't actually deserve 15 years in a hospital ward". Perhaps he doesn't, but the world works on causal chains rather than fairness.
>Governments composed of humans are not natural disasters.
The North Korean government is pretty close. The people in it are borderline insane, so you can't deal with them like you would deal with rational human beings.
I don't think they are insane, just incredibly self-serving to the point where they would leave the rest of the country in abject poverty in order to maintain their stranglehold on the country's leadership and the power, wealth and influence that comes with it.
What happens if Kim abdicated and NK became a true democratic state? He and the rest of the leadership would be hunted down for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It's a dynasty protecting itself at the expense of everyone else.
If they really wanted to do that, it wouldn't be very hard; they'd just do something like what the UK did: set themselves up as permanent monarchs (of a sort) and then set up a parliament and gradually shift power to it while keeping the Kim dynasty as head-of-state. Make sure to write the laws so they can't be applied retroactively, eventually make the Kims figureheads who just sign the laws and act as a possible last-resort in case the parliament goes out of control or does something they really don't like, but otherwise stay out of governing.
No, I think the dynasty stays in power because they actually want to be in power.
That's pretty harsh man. He's a kid and doesn't deserve 15 years for tearing down a poster. Look at the humanity in it regardless of how factual NK behaves.
The kid simply doesn't deserve it and it's the _right thing to do_ to help him.
He's twenty-one years old. He can drive a heavy vehicle, vote for politicians that affect all of society, and die in a uniform for his country.
> doesn't deserve 15 years for tearing down a poster
I don't think he deserves it either. I also don't think people deserve years of jailtime for simple possession of drugs, yet american jails are full of such people. The same kind of "kids" who make the same kind of decisions ("this will be fun!"). The right thing to do there is not imprison those people - even if you think possession should be illegal, years of jailtime is too excessive a punishment.
The only thing that makes this newsworthy is that it happened in NK, and he's 'lucky' about that - because newsworthy = publicly visible, and that means the government is more likely to get involved. If this had happened in a place like Eritrea, it'd be lucky to make the news, because as I said above, this kind of stuff happens to hundreds of people every year.
Sure, but that's not the question. The question is: Is it the right thing to do to help him, at the expense of helping someone else? They don't deserve it either.
But life is unfair, and we can only do so much at once - this is basic opportunity cost. It's simply impossible for us to do everything at once - we're merely human. Even when your goal is to eventually save everyone, you have to prioritize.
Even when the stakes are as high as helping people survive North Korea. Perhaps especially then - when it matters most to do as much good as possible.
Sure, by our standards. He's not in a place that operates by our standards. And he knew that going in. Some people seem to have this illusion that the rest of the world is what they want it to be, rather than what it is.
You're replying to the comment that quite accurately makes the case "deserve's got NOTHING to do with it", and your only argument is that he doesn't deserve it.
Watching competing projects also added some degree of assurance. Without giving out any specific names, we are aware of a number of competing projects that even now keep heavily relying on CloudFlare (although I am obviously unaware of how much they pay), so we didn't consider it an abusive behavior. In contrast, we were also aware of at least one competitor that kept pushing a considerable portion of their uploads to imgur and basically parasitizing on them for a long time until imgur's abuse team finally took notice and brought down the hammer.